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The Quietus

There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

Maria Bustillos writes about her Santeria-practicing grandmother for The Awl, and paints a portrait that is both damning and redeeming of a women she experienced through a child’s eyes. Quote: “I shan’t bore you with the things that drove everyone nuts about my grandmother, that wicked witch whom I loved so dearly. Why should I dwell on all that? The humiliation and fear, the refusal to let my beloved cousin T. go to UC-Irvine because girls are meant to find a nice man and have babies and maybe work at a bank? The tears. Instead, I shall tell you that when you went to my grandmother’s house you would find on various surfaces, on tables and shelves, little wasp-waisted shrimp cocktail glasses full of water and sometimes roses from the garden, set before photographs of the dead. There were many painted plaster polychrome saints with coins piled before them. One had a boat filled with supplicants beneath her, struggling through plaster waves. Coins in the boat. The scent of flowers and food, the sound of voices. The warm and perilous embrace of a witch.”

The Quietus interviews Hexvessel’s Matthew McNerney, who talks about his band’s unique mix of metal, jazz and psychedelic folk, and also opens about Paganism, the natural world, and practicing magick. Quote: “I was brought up a Catholic, so I know about organised religion. I’ve always been interested in the occult and magick. I don’t know how much you can say about practising magick, because I think it’s something that’s very personal and very subjective and I think this album is about that. It’s about “When does magick become objective? When does religion become an objective thing? What does it mean to be holy?” It’s all connected with nature and how we see ourselves in relation to the world around us. It’s definitely the theme of the album, and I believe that we’re creating and practising magick all the time.”

There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

The BBC presents “The Ancestors are Calling,” a radio documentary of a South African woman weighing the decision of whether to become a traditional healer and provide “a channel for the power of the ancestral spirits,” or “get on with her life as a young African woman in the 21st Century.”

“Factor in some good chill out time, sometime during the day or night. Find quiet to relax alone, even just for ten minutes: find some peace … Visit the stone circle. Walk it a few times, feel its calm and how it sits deeply rooted in the landscape … Don’t make a mess or abandon your rubbish, and thank the spirit of the land when you leave.”

That’s all well and good, but surely they’d want some Pagan suggestions on which acts to check out, right? Since anyone who’s going is probably already there, this is pure armchair quarterbacking, but I’d definitely check out Bat For Lashes, Fleet Foxes, Fairport Convention, The Horrors, Bon Iver, and Tunng. Artists who have all been played on my A Darker Shade of Pagan podcast at some time or another. Also, from a purely personal standpoint (outside a Pagan purview), I wouldn’t want to miss Echo and The Bunnymen or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds either.